AMD Radeon HD 6670 1GB & HD 6570 512MB Review

From ATI Stream to AMD APP Technology

As AMD is moving to all but abolish the ATI brand, a number of technologies are being renamed and rationalized. The Stream name was once given to ATI’s GPGPU compute initiative to differentiate it from NVIDIA’s highly successful CUDA environment. Things are about to change….a bit.

In order to carry on Stream’s torch, AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or APP has been created. Yes, the whole “App” moniker has been used so much that it’s now becoming a bit of a cliché but in this case, it seems to be aptly translated. This is now an all-encompassing term which can be used for graphics cards as well as AMD’s new upcoming generation of Fusion APUs.

AMD’s new APP SDK v2.2 is about to hit developers’ doorsteps and with it will come the integration of OpenCL computing for both x86-based CPUs and GPUs. This is one of APP’s major benefits over NVIDIA’s competing solution as it can be leveraged for a heterogeneous environment where specific tasks are sent towards the processor which will complete them most efficiently.

From our understanding, Stream’s name may have changed but its goal to deliver high performance computing on the GPU through OpenCL, DirectCompute and other APIs is still very much alive and well. If anything, it has actually expanded now that AMD is able to leverage both their CPUs and GPUs under the same programming umbrella.

More than four months after the launch of NVIDIA's GTX 1060, we take another look at its performance against AMD's RX 480 8GB in more than a dozen games. The results of this one may surprise you........